Learning as You Go: A Non Music-Specialist Teacher’s Journey Through Creating and Making Music in a Primary School

Abstract

This chapter provides a critical counterpoint that is timely in Singapore’s arts education history, with governmental support for arts education at its height, moving away from a tradition of generalist arts teachers into a recognition and need for specialized arts educators in the primary schools. The tensions and issues of training for generalist vs. specialist teachers in a changing musical landscape is fleshed out through the journey of an experienced general music teacher encountering the teaching of creative music activities (namely composition and improvisation) for the first time. The chapter brings into question the requisite skill set a generalist music teacher is required to have in order to facilitate creative music activities (read mostly compositional and improvisational activities) in the music classroom. It suggests that teacher control (read levels of freedom), confidence and competence, which goes beyond skill sets, are at the heart of an engaged creative music making endeavor and posits a closer look at local music teacher education that has often favored a more structured pedagogical perspective anchored within a perceived necessity on having a foundation of an Anglo-American Western classical music tradition.